As a non-Lawyer, I have found myself drawn in to some technical/legal disputes. Sometimes there is disagreement about the technical aspects, sometimes the legal ones, sometimes bot, but they involved Tort and Contract Law, not Criminal, Family etc.

Climate Science has abused the professional bodies and Journals, along with their self selected and unaccountable Peer Approval/Review process.

Resorting to Law, and then delaying, hoping that someone else dies, goes bust, or a miracle happens, seems to be Climate Science's only defence (apart from lying and false accusations), as they have run out of science.

Mann has made up Phil Clarke's mind for him. Science and Law is not allowed to impede the Green Party, as they demonstrate for the media.

Calling someone a 'data torturer' is hardly polite, McIntyre could have made his critiques without the name calling. At least one of his criticisms - the exclusion by Gergis of the Law Dome series was based on him using the wrong dataset. And as commenter Brandon Shollenberger points out in the commets there's a perfectly valid explanation for what McIntyre assumes to be an arbitrary truncation of a dataset.

Also, it is one thing to disagree with the methods used in a study, to achieve credibility you should then followup and evaluate the impact of doing the study differently. McIntyre rarely if ever takes this necessary step, because often it would show he is making mountains out of nitpicks. Centred vs decentred PCA in the Mann HS studies being a good example. However, in the comments he concedes that the screening and the 1-year lag issue don't make a whole heap of difference.

Gergis et al have a published paper, McIntyre has a couple of blog posts.

Steve, I’m horrified by your slipshod work. You did not define what you compare, what dataset used in each case, how data were processed, and what was the reason for that, what limitation there are, what kind of additional information you need to know. Why didn’t you ask me for all the details? You even aren’t ashamed of using information from stolen letters.

Do carelessness, grubbiness, dishonourableness are the necessary concomitants of your job?

With disrespect…

Comment by respected dendochronologist Rashit Hantemirov, after McIntyre did one of his reconstruction mashups using data Hantemirov had supplied.

I suppose I shouldn't make a comment that leads into a discussion unless I have time to respond actively thereafter; and I'm a bit short of time for this at the moment.

So, RR and gc, thanks for your responses. We're not really in disagreement over the main substance.

As for this:

"Nobody credible has found a flaw in Gergis's work." Is it libellous? A matter for the Courts, obviously, should anyone who claims to have found a flaw in Gergis' work take issue with it. As for the credibility of any such, I suppose that would have to be decided by evidence. At least anyone suing would have the advantage of being the claimant, so they could force the pace, and not be subject to the endless delays that seem to occur when you're the defendant and keen to get on with it, but the claimant seems less keen...

Having said that, I wouldn't want to see Phil get sued for what is essentially an expression of opinion. We all need to be careful online, as it's easy to get carried away, but I rather regret the eagerness of some people to resort to litigation, especially if it's a tool to close down debate. Long may freedom of speech hold sway. The only question is where to draw the line, and I fear today's liberals aren't really that liberal, and would draw the line a long way from where I (an old-fashioned liberal - with a small "l") would draw it. But I digress...

Still waiting for Phil or anyone to ge back to me and show "Where in that Lancet report does it mention a 50,000 deaths claim , and where are its calculations ?"

Feb 17, 2018 at 11:59 AM | stewgreen

Climate Scientists really need lots of people to die, so they can be proved right. Climate Scientists are very disappointed that Polar Bears have refused to be annihilated, and so faking death statistics along with causes and attributions has become full-time work.

"As floodwaters from the swollen River Thames crept closer to the walls of Myles Allen's south Oxford home in the United Kingdom, he was thinking about climate change—and if scientists could figure out if it was affecting the climbing water outside.

It was January 2003, and as Allen—a climate expert at the University of Oxford—monitored the rising waters from the safety of his house, a voice on the radio was telling him that it couldn't be done. Sure, the flood was the type of event likely to be made more frequent by global warming, the representative of the United Kingdom's Met Office said on the show. But ascertaining anything more concrete was out of reach."

At the time, the Thames River Basin had seen some of its greatest rainfall in decades, and by early January, the flow in some parts of the river was the highest it had been since 1947.

But the radio voice added that it would be "impossible to attribute this particular event [floods in southern England] to past emissions of greenhouse gases," said Allen in a commentary published in Nature shortly thereafter.

In 2003, that was the predominant view in the scientific community: While climate change surely has a significant effect on the weather, there was no way to determine its exact influence on any individual event. There are just too many other factors affecting the weather, including all sorts of natural climate variations.

But Allen wasn't so sure.

"At the time, everybody was saying, 'Well, you can't attribute a single event to climate change,'" he said in an interview with E&E News. "And this prompted me to ask, 'Why not?'"

So he drafted his commentary as the floodwaters inched closer to his kitchen door. He wrote that it might not always be impossible to attribute extreme weather events to climate change—just "simply impossible at present, given our current state of understanding of the climate system." And if researchers were ever able to make that breakthrough, he mused, the science could potentially influence the public's ability to blame greenhouse gas emitters for the damages caused by climate-related events.

His hunch held true. Nearly 15 years later, extreme event attribution not only is possible, but is one of the most rapidly expanding subfields of climate science.

"The public stance of the scientific community about individual event attribution in the year 2000 is that it's not something that science does," said Noah Diffenbaugh, a Stanford University climate scientist and attribution expert. "And so to go from that to now, that you'll find a paper every week ... that's why we say there's been an explosion of research. It's gone from zero to 60, basically."

I am still not sure if CO2 has an effect on temperature, outside of a laboratory test tube or computer generated climate model, that has been programmed to produce warming.

I had worked out that there was something wrong about Mann's Hockey Stick, not through an understanding of physics, but through history, science, geography (religion) etc that I had learned at school before I was a teenager - the climate warmed and cooled over the last few thousand years, without fossil fuels.

Climate Science is stuck with Mann's Hockey Stick, because Climate Scientists lack the honesty and integrity to admit it is based on something wrong. Phil Clarke proves this.

You will be aware of bad bits of Law, whether it has evolved through Precedent, or was written into Statutes. It can take years to correct/amend/change it.

Climate Science is locked in Denial. Climate Scientists acted as Prosecution, Judge and Jury to find CO2 guilty, without a trial, using flawed evidence, and no Defence was allowed. Climate Scientists can not even produce any evidence, that any other evidence was ever considered.

Nobody is going to miss the routine scaremongering of Climate Scientists, but someone needs to pay to clean up Science.

"Nobody is going to miss the routine scaremongering of Climate Scientists, but someone needs to pay to clean up Science."

Why not just let government funded science just die off to a large extent? A lot of the great technology advances over the last 2 or 3 decades have little academic involvement ie IT and Telecoms for example where the likes of Google have dominated and progressed the state of the art a long way. The internet itself makes the whole academic anonymous review system redundant. Just have your work sanity checked in house then publish it to the world and see what they think.

I read a lot of history books, and one of the reasons for my scepticism is what I have read there - a lot of it doesn't fit with what "climate scientists" would have us believe. I prefer to believe historical facts (especially if I can satisfy myself as to their validity, e.g. by visiting the sites of Iron Age hill forts) than unproven computer models.

I think Trump is pulling US Taxpayer funding from Climate Science, and the UN's IPCC. If the US EPA cancel/reverse the finding that CO2 is a "pollutant", Trump does not need to wait for Mann's Hockey Stick to disintegrate in Court, or for Climate Science to get honest, about what is wrong.

How much money has been wasted on flawed research and data manipulation in order to "prove Mann's Hockey Stick", as Phil Clarke triumphantly proclaimed that Gergis 2016 had achieved? Why has Climate Science been so worried about flaws in Mann's Hockey Stick being exposed?

Climate Science will wither on the vine, without a legal or political shoot-out.

Meteorologists can get on with improving weather forecasting, which does benefit the world, and save lives and money.

Climate Science has failed to self correct, and has deliberately corrupted the honest development of "Science" because of collaborative Pay Per Peer Review.

"March the Guilty Bastard In" – an apocryphal announcement reputedly stated by curmudgeonly senior officers presiding over Summary Trials, usually taken to imply that any soldier, having been charged, was certainly guilty of some crime and deserving of punishment, even if not guilty of the charge about to be read.

November and December 2002 had seen a sucession of depressions bringing heavy rain. The chalk was saturated, and the Thames was running "high" from Oxford to Reading to Henley to Maidenhead. More heavy rain fell through Christmas and New Year, and the River went "Out of Banks" (flooded!) during the first week of Jan 2003.

It was the worst flood since 1947, when the very cold winter had caused months of snow to accumulate on frozen ground. Then it warmed, and rained.

The highest Thames flood event that I have seen mark on Riverside Pubs, Lock Keepers Cottages, Bridges etc was 1894 (or was it 1892?!). I have no idea what caused that.

The flooding of 2003 was then followed by a warm dry summer. The two events caused me to think that Global Warming MIGHT be occurring. But the warmer 1920s and 1930s followed by bad wartime winters, then 1947 and 1962/3, the new ice age scare in the early 1970s (which I do remember!) the 1976 drought, the knowledge that it "was always a few degrees warmer in London" etc, all combined to make me think that Climate Science was highly selective about their "evidence"!

On the Hampshire South Downs, about 700 feet up, snow has fallen and settled on the grass four times this year, with far more frosts. More is forecast. I doubt the BBC/Met Office will announce that this is the coldest winter for 6 or 7(?) years.

Many town and city residents are unhappy about the number of street trees that have been pollarded or felled since 2001.

Case Law had evolved in a wishy washy manner, leading to uncertainty. I was aware of the uncertainty amongst technical experts AND Lawyers, and that a test case was going to resolve it. That was in the early 1990s. I had no personal involvement with the case. It took almost ten years to get to the House of Lords.

Some may consider it Bad Law (treehuggers). I don't, because it confirms responsibility and liability, which goes back to Rylands v Fletcher. Local Authorities and homeowners now know where they stand. Climate Science still stands by the uncertainty of Mann's Stick.

As climate-change lawsuits against the oil industry mount, Exxon Mobil Corp. is taking a bare-knuckle approach rarely seen in legal disputes: It’s going after the lawyers who are suing it.

The company has targeted at least 30 people and organizations, including the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts, hitting them with suits, threats of suits or demands for sworn depositions. The company claims the lawyers, public officials and environmental activists are “conspiring” against it in a coordinated legal and public relations campaign.

Exxon has even given that campaign a vaguely sinister-sounding name: “The La Jolla playbook.” According to the company, about two dozen people hatched a strategy against it at a meeting six years ago in an oceanfront cottage in La Jolla, Calif."

The meeting of like-minded conspirators was Oct 2012, the month before Obama was re-elected. Another back-up insurance plan?

The use of RICO was discussed. That opening salvo was fired by the Shukla Letter, which went a bit wrong:

Even William M Connolley was not impressed with the quality of the lies incompetence and corruption:https://cliscep.com/2016/05/21/the-rico-emails/

The Shukla letter was sent to President Obama, with the connivance of John Holdren, who jumped on the New Ice Age Bandwagon, then the Global Warming Bandwagon, and was sufficiently qualified in the mind of Obama, to be his expert-from Wikipedia:

"John Paul Holdren (born March 1, 1944) was the senior advisor to President Barack Obama on science and technology issues through his roles as Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)."

"Holdren was previously the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University,[7] director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at the School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Director of the Woods Hole Research Center."

If challenged, Obama could blame Holdren for misguiding him. But if challenged, who will Holdren blame? Paul R. Ehrlich? Stephen Schneider?